Chapter 428: Foundation
"Ragnar..." Erik breathed out, crossing his arms over his white polar bear furs.
"What happened to you down there in City Titan?"
Ragnar slowly turned his head.
He looked at the giant King of Iceland for a long moment.
The three foreign marshals standing behind Ragnar shifted slightly in their armor, their hands resting on the hilts of their weapons.
They were ready to defend their King from any perceived insult, even from a loyal vassal.
"Nothing happened to me." Ragnar finally answered. "I am just tired of fighting the exact same stupid battles against the exact same stupid kings."
"You brought fifteen thousand men and three foreign marshals to my port," Erik pointed out, his brow furrowed. "You don’t do that just because you are a little tired. You are planning something massive, aren’t you? Something that requires a completely insane amount of blood."
However, Ragnar didn’t offer a comforting smile or a boasting laugh.
He just turned his attention back to the crackling fire, staring deeply into the bright orange flames.
"The Emperor’s grand coalition is growing by the absolute day," Ragnar said quietly. "If we sit here and play sieges for the next ten years, they will eventually bleed us dry. They have too many peasants to throw at our rifles. We cannot just win battles anymore, Erik... we have to break their will to fight."
Ragnar slowly stepped away from the fire and walked back toward the table.
He placed his hands flat on the map of Europe.
"I am going to end this war soon." Ragnar declared. "I am going to end it so violently that no southern lord will ever dare look toward the north again. And I have to do it quickly."
"Why the sudden rush?" Domnall the Scot asked, speaking up for the very first time.
"....."
"I am sick of looking at this tiny, crowded map," Ragnar growled, tapping his finger against the parchment showing the Frankish Empire.
Though the Iron King’s words sounded like the ramblings of an exhausted man, there was a fierce spark of ambition burning deep in his eyes.
"Once I shatter Emperor Louis and burn his grand coalition to ash..." Ragnar whispered, looking around the room at his commanders. "I am going to explore the new world."
Inside his own mind, Ragnar was thinking hard about the sheer absurdity of his current situation.
He knew perfectly well from his knowledge of human history that the Vikings eventually got to America.
The ancient sagas of his old world spoke clearly of Leif Erikson, of incredibly brave northern explorers crossing the dangerous ocean to find a massive, completely untouched continent.
They found endless timber, green shores, and wild lands long before any southern empire even entirely knew it existed.
It was supposed to be in their blood...
They were supposed to be the absolute greatest sailors the world had ever seen.
But looking around this longhouse, staring at the baffled, entirely confused faces of his top northern commanders... now all of them don’t know anything.
There were absolutely no whispers of western lands in the local taverns.
There were no crazy, drunken sailors boasting about finding a new continent covered in thick forests.
They hadn’t even fully mapped out the northern ice of Greenland yet... It was completely blank to them.
Is the history lying? Ragnar thought to himself, a frown forming on his scarred face.
Were the historical sagas he read back in his original life just entirely fabricated myths?
Did the Norsemen actually discover the Americas by blind luck centuries later?
Or had his massive, violent disruption of the timeline altered their natural path of exploration?
By handing them steel cannons, repeating rifles, and steam engines, had he distracted them from looking toward the western horizon?
He honestly didn’t know... the heavy burden of rewriting the fate of the entire world was exactly what was crushing his usual cheerful personality.
He was playing a massive game of chess with the future of humanity, and he couldn’t see the edges of the board anymore.
But he knew one thing for absolute certain...
If they didn’t know about the Americas yet, he would tell them for sure. He would drag them there himself if he had to.
Richard, the slim southern scholar in the ruined coat, had been standing silently near the edge of the room.
He had been listening to the exchange, captivated by the raw ambition rolling off the Iron King.
Richard knew the limits of the known world... he knew the maps that the greatest scholars in Paris and Rome had painstakingly drawn.
There was absolutely nothing out there in the deep western ocean but endless salt water, terrifying storms, and certain death.
Yet, the certainty in King Ragnar’s voice shattered everything Richard thought he knew.
"Forgive me, King Ragnar, I am very curious... but would you enlighten us?" Richard asked quietly.
Thus, the silence inside the grand Norwegian longhouse stretched on for what felt like an eternity.
Richard was acutely aware of the three foreign marshals glaring at the back of his neck.
He had just directly questioned the ruler of the Iron Kingdom, a man who possessed the raw power to have his head separated from his shoulders with a single nod.
King Ragnar didn’t look angry, though. He slowly looked down at the southern scholar, his exhausted eyes coming back to life.
A faint, almost nostalgic smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
He took a deep breath, and when he finally spoke, his voice was the calm tone of an old teacher sharing a massive secret.
"Imagine a landmass, Richard," Ragnar began. "A continent so incredibly massive that if you took the entire Frankish Empire, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the massive deserts of Cordoba, and the frozen mountains of the north, and placed them all together... they would still easily fit inside it with room to spare."
After hearing such words, Richard actually let out a nervous laugh.
He couldn’t help it... his scholarly mind completely rejected the math.